Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was born in the southern English town of Bromley, where his parents operated a small shop. The family had little money, but as a boy Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, London. This prestigious school attracted some of the foremost thinkers of the day, including the famous and controversial biologist T. H. Huxley, who became Wells’s teacher and mentor there. With The Time Machine (1895), his first novel, Wells embarked on a prolific and varied writing career, dominating the British literary scene into the 1930s. His massive output (some 120 books, along with numerous articles and stories) falls into four major categories. First came the popular “scientific romances,” including The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). Wells then wrote several comic novels, such as Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900) and Kipps (1905), and a series of novels focusing on social issues: Ann Veronica (1909), for instance, deals with women’s emancipation, and Tono-Bungay (1909) with class, capitalism and scientific progress. At the same time, his books of history (The Outline of History; 1920) and futuristic speculation (Anticipations, 1901; A Modern Utopia, 1905; The Shape of Things to Come, 1933) kept Wells’s often radical social opinions more directly before the public eye.
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